Any fix on symptoms will only give the worst offenders more excuses to increase emissions. See carbon capture and carbon credits. It’s already being used as an excuse to not do anything real about the problem.
Because band aide solutions are just bullshit distractions. We need less emissions and we need it yesterday.
I think we’re past just lowering emissions. We need to find ways pull some of the co2 out of the atmosphere.
Cool - but lowering emissions is far more effective than any of these solutions. Let’s get serious about that before discussing remediation.
It is still being studied, and we don’t know the potential ecological impacts. Estimates are that it might help sequester a meaningful amount of carbon, but only maybe 1/10 what needs to be removed by 2050.
I apologize because I don’t have a source in mind, but my recollection from studying this in grad school (which was admittedly about a decade ago) was that sequestration was one of the hardest parts of this. Creating a bloom of algae was feasible, but even if we ignore a lot of other ecosystem management complications that others have pointed out, there wasn’t a reliable mechanism to convert a bloom of algae into a long-term carbon store.
I could be mistaken here. I’m open-minded towards this kind of geoengineering. But I’m also very skeptical that if this could work, it could do so at a rate that would enable us to continue burning fossil fuels at scale, and there is a strong base of support for this technology among people with that attitude.
The hope is the phytoplankton are in an area where iron is scarce and they die and sink to the seabed. One experiment in 2009 ended up with zooplankton consuming the bloom, so it has definitely failed at times.
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CO2 emissions are not the only problem with burning things for power. Air polution causes an estimated 3.6 million deaths annualy (thats like world war 2 every 20 years), with the bulk of those (2.1 million) being caused just by ultrafine soot and ozone from burning fues. Additionaly, burning coal produces huge amount of ashes that are full of toxic heavy metals, in quanties that are near impossible to safely dispose of. Most of this ash just gets pilled up, where it it gets blown into the enviroment. (Fun fact, these ash piles are radioactive from naturaly occuring uranium and thorium)
The only way out is to stop burning things as fuel.
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It could change the pH of the oceans, making it harder for anything to live there. Plus, it might not store the CO2 for longer than 1000 years, which doesnt really solve the issue (I have a source for that somewhere, I think it was the IPCC).
Because it’s a bandaid on an arterial bleed of a problem and has its own host of issues (anoxia once the algae blooms die off being one of the big ones, aside from the cost of actually doing it on a global scale). Lots of discussion around whether it makes sense to do, but really for the effort to do it, and the unintended effects on the environment, it would probably be better and cheaper to just reduce GHG emissions.
Just reducing GHG emissions doesn’t stimulate the economy though.
Creating an entirely new industry “for the economy” is the reason this is even being contemplated. If you care more about the economy than the planet you live on and the people you share it with, then maybe that makes sense.
Well, why not? Any replacement power generation or transportstion systems will require construction and maintenence, just like any other project.
Sure, but that money wouldn’t go to oil and natural gas companies.
… Good?
Depends on if those companies invest in renewables or not. Optimistically, they will need to pivot in the next 60 years or so. I expect that the military need for oil won’t go anywhere anytime soon, but there is regulation coming into play to limit automotive oil reliance. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere.
and that’s bad why?
The actual choice, is
- we either act proactively, or
- our remnant ( if any ) regret, retroactively.
This isn’t consensus for a simulation/model, this is actual historical fact:
- Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years
- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19798
They’re ignoring methane, and they’re stating, explicitly, that at our current atmospheric CO2, the planet historically stabilized at between +5C & +6C.
When one factors-in the added methane, 1.3ppm to 1.4ppm, at 82.5x factor, we’re actually between +8C & +9C planet-equilibrium-temperature for our current atmosphere.
-4C put 2 miles thick of ice on North America: planet-degrees are BIG.
Humankind simply is either too devoutly-ignorant or too stupid to live, from the looks of it.
After it has happened, oh, then humanity’ll admit it ought do something…
Utterly retarded, and the obliteration-of-billions-of-lives it is setting-up the enforcing of, is needless.
Sounds like a win-win to me
Check out GeoGirl on YouTube, she has an excellent video about this. https://youtu.be/IYOTFuklRvI
She also has a lot of other videos where she describes different geological processes and their interconnectedness.
